Sonatype Java Repository Now Accepts .NET Components

Sonatype today released a new version of its Maven-based component repository that supports software developers using the .NET Framework. Version 2.0 of Sonatype's Nexus Professional, a widely used repository manager for Java components, adds support for.NET developers who want to store and manage their components in a repository.

"The .NET world is kind of where the Java world was five years ago," said Brian Fox, Sonatype's vice president of engineering. "It's just discovering the importance of a centralized management facility for sharing binary components. There is no great solution for sharing .NET components out there right now. Developers share them via source control systems or file systems, but there's no analog to a repository manager in .NET. Until now."

Sonatype Nexus Professional 2.0 allows development teams to store and access .NET components packaged with the NuGet, the Visual Studio 2010 extension. "It makes it easy to install and update third-party components into .NET projects," Fox told ADTmag. "By using proxies of .NET repositories co-located with developers, companies can reduce the time it takes to load a NuGet package into Visual Studio. Using a repository also streamlines the sharing of internal components among enterprise developers, their colleagues, and counterparts."

Sonatype is aiming for the vast majority of enterprises with heterogeneous development environments with this release. The idea is to provide organizations with a single, standardized repository manager for all development, Java, OSGi and .NET.

Among the features available in this release is the Nexus Available Architecture, which is designed to ensure that components are always available for consumption, which "eliminates development delays caused when the network is down and keeps geographically distributed teams in sync."

It also comes with Repository Health Awareness, a bundle of services based on Sonatype Insight designed to identify "problematic components throughout the application development process and into production." The service makes it possible for developers to create white and black lists based on real-time component licensing and security information.

"Nexus has long been the gold standard in the Java world and increasingly our customers are asking us to support heterogeneous environments," said Jason van Zyl, CTO and founder of Sonatype in a statement. "Bringing the advantage of Nexus to the .NET community is a big step for Sonatype and should be very helpful to users."